Portfolio Management Techniques Help Rationalize IT Budgets in Tough Economy

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on managing IT departments in the face of an economic downturn and an infusion of stimulus cash.

Listen to the podcast. Download the transcript. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Compuware.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the importance of managing IT departments in dynamic business environments. The current economic downturn has certainly highlighted how drastically businesses and, of course, the IT operations within them need to change, whether in growth, in terms of cutting out business units, functions, or processes, and then also setting themselves up for either a change in market direction or renewed growth in existing businesses.

For the past year or so, organizations may have watched their revenues decrease, their customers slide, and their supply chains change drastically right before their eyes. So, as budgets in the IT department have reacted to this reality, they've been managing change, but they also need to manage the horizon, keep their eye on what's coming next in terms of growth. For many industries, that includes a large amount of stimulus money being driven into certain activities.

We're here to talk to an executive from Compuware about how IT organizations can better understand managing change, how they can employ IT portfolio management techniques and products and processes, and better manage their short-term shrinkage or reduction needs, while maintaining an opportunity to be flexible when the tide turns.

So please join me in welcoming Lori Ellsworth, Vice President of Changepoint Solutions at Compuware. Hi, Lori.

Lori Ellsworth: Hello.

Gardner: We're also joined by David A. Kelly, Senior Analyst at Upside Research. Hello, Dave.

David A. Kelly: Hey, Dana, great to be here with you.

Gardner: Dave, let me start with you. We have seen over the years, complexity increasing in IT organizations. They've taken on more activities that IT departments are responsible for and that includes people, process, products, and technologies. Tell me, if you will, about the lay of the land when it comes to IT portfolio management, perhaps a little historical context, and then we can get more into the problems that we are facing nowadays.

Kelly: Sure, Dana. The place to start with IT portfolio management is the idea that it's really hard to improve, if you don't have a way to measure how you're doing or a way to set goals for where you want to be. That's the idea behind IT portfolio management, as well as project and portfolio management (PPM), which is an early nomenclature for a similar type of goal. That was to take the same type of metrics and measurements that organizations have had in the financial area around their financial processes and try to apply that in the IT area and around the projects they have going on.

It measures the projects, as well as helps try to define a way to communicate between the business side of an organization that's setting the goals for what these projects or applications are going to be used for, and the IT side of the organization, which is trying to implement these. And, it makes sure that there are some metrics, measurements, and ways to correlate between the business and IT side.

What we've also seen recently is this move toward IT portfolio management, where the focus is not just upon the projects themselves that are going on in the IT organization, but also on the applications and the resources that the IT group has deployed and measuring how well those are meeting the business needs.

Gardner: Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that for the last several years, managing growth and complexity has been paramount for these technologies and approaches.

Sea change in IT

Kelly: Absolutely. That's where the economy was and that's where a lot of organizations have been over the past three or four years in terms of ramping up new services and deploying new things. As you said in your intro, there has pretty much been a sea change over the past nine months or so in terms of the economy as well as how organizations need to react to it.

Now, there's an opportunity for organizations to step back, take the same type of tools, and begin to apply them to tougher economic times. They can make sure they're making the right decisions for today, as well as to lay the groundwork for future growth.

Things are going to turn around maybe later this year or next year. When that happens, resources are going to be tight and constrained. So, organizations are going to have to have the right information to be making the best decisions to capitalize upon that growth when it comes, as well as to get them through this tough period, where they have to optimize the limited resources they have to deal with the current business situation.

Gardner: Lori Ellsworth, perhaps you could share with us what you're hearing from your customers. It seems the keyword here is "change." How does this change management relate to IT portfolio management from where your customers are sitting now?

Ellsworth: It ties into the business environment that David was just talking about. IT organizations now are moving towards acting in a more strategic role. As we've just talked about, things are changing rapidly in the business environment, which means the organizations that they're serving need to change quickly and they are depending on, or insisting on, IT changing and being responsive with them.

It's essential that IT needs to watch what's going on, participate in the business, and move quickly to respond to competitive opportunities or economic challenges. They need to understand everything that's underway in their organization to serve the business and what they have available to them in terms of resources and they need to be able to collaborate and interact with the business on a regular basis to adjust and make change and continue to serve the business.

I can contrast that historically to different times, where IT played a different role, and there were different economic conditions, where it was much easier to make decisions and work on a project and go off and work on that project for a year. That's not the world we live in today, and IT needs to be as responsive as the rest of the business.

Gardner: I'm sure IT is not alone in needing to very firmly rationalize their spending, both operationally and on new spending. It also appears to me that you have to be able to have the actual data in hand. You can't go to a budget-minded executive -- a COO, for example, or a CFO -- and rationalize your budget with estimates or soft approaches to this. What is it about IT portfolio management that puts data into the process?

Ellsworth: First of all, we have to think about it as a company. Those COO's

. . . they need to understand who are the people, what is the cost, and where can we make changes to respond to the business.

who you've just referred to, are investing money in IT. It may be coming from the business units, but they're making an investment in technology to serve the business. IT needs to understand how they, in collaboration with the business, are making decisions to use that money, what they're investing it in, and where they have an opportunity to make changes to better serve the business.

If IT wants to engage in a conversation about moving investments, about stopping something they're working on so they can respond to a market opportunity, for example, they need to understand who are the people, what is the cost, and where can we make changes to respond to the business.

Gardner: Making those priorities requires a comparison. So, a cost-benefit analysis might be one approach. Again, if you don't have the details about what it is that IT is doing and what it's capable of, you're not able to bring a true cost benefit analysis into this discussion.

Cost-benefit analysis

Ellsworth: Absolutely. And, this approach as you suggested, the cost-benefit analysis, that's about a business approach. In other words, this isn't about IT deciding on different projects they could work on and what benefit it might deliver to the business. The business is at the table, collaborating, looking at all the potential opportunities for investment, and reaching agreement as a business on what are the top priorities.

Gardner: Dave Kelly, what else do you see in terms of the problem set here, when it comes to this dynamic environment and managing change, whether it's growth or whether it's contraction across people and process? We seem to have, of course, the need for the data, for the information, but then, once we get to the point of execution, it seems to me that this insight into the portfolio can also be important.

Kelly: Yes, it is important. I'm going to key on a couple of words that Lori mentioned in responding to your question. The other thing that's needed is consistency. When you're making these kinds of decisions, for a lot of IT organizations and organizations in general, if times are good, you can make a lot of decisions in an ad hoc fashion and still be pretty successful.

But, in dynamic and more challenging economic times, you want the decisions that you or other people on the IT team, as well as the business, are making to be consistent. You want them to have some basis in reality and in an accepted process. You talked about metrics here and what kind of metrics can you provide to the COO.

You need consistency in these dynamic times and also you need a way to collaborate, as Lori brought up. That's a really good point, in terms of being able to collaborate between the business and IT, because you are always making these trade-offs.

Unless you have all the money in the world, for these decisions about applications or projects within the IT organization you need to collaborate within the IT organization and have a consistent view on what's going on, as well as collaborating with the business stakeholders and making sure that you are making the right decisions there. Those are couple of key points to think about in these turbulent and dynamic times.

Gardner: I think you're also pointing to the need for automating those labor-intensive

So, the moment we rely on individual efforts or on people who have to go out and sit through meetings and collect data, we're not getting data that we can necessarily trust.

manual processes. Perhaps you're using spreadsheets or perhaps using a siloed approach of just looking at certain elements of the IT environment, rather than a comprehensive view that doesn't scale in terms of complexity or time. We need to reevaluate a budget now in two months, rather than on a yearly or six-month cycle. Let me take it back to Lori. To what degree do manual processes break down in terms of how IT manages its portfolio?

Ellsworth: There are a couple of problems with manual processes. As you suggested, they're very labor-intensive. We've talked about responsiveness. We need information to drive decision-making. So, the moment we rely on individual efforts or on people who have to go out and sit through meetings and collect data, we're not getting data that we can necessarily trust. We're not getting data that is timely to your point and we're not able to make those decisions to be responsive.

You end up with a situation where very definitely your resources are busy and fully deployed, but they're not necessarily doing the right things that matter the most to the business. That data needs to be real-time, so that, at multiple levels in the organization, we can be constantly assessing the health and the alignment in terms of what IT is doing to deliver to the business, and we have the information to make a change.

Kelly: Dana, if I could interject here. To me, it's a little bit analogous to what we saw maybe 10 years or a little longer ago in software development, when a whole bunch of automated testing tools became available, and organizations started to put a lot of emphasis in that area.

As you're developing an application, you can certainly test it manually and have people sitting there testing it, but when you can automate those processes they become more consistent. They become thorough, and they become something that can be done automatically in the background.

Fewer resources, higher quality

It takes fewer resources and less money to get much higher quality and a better result. We're seeing the same thing when it comes to managing IT applications and projects, and the whole situation that's going on in the IT area.

When you start looking at IT portfolio management, that provides the same kind of automation, controls, and structure by which you can not only increase the quality of the decisions that are being made, but you can also do it in a way that almost results in less overhead and less manual work from an organization.

You are always making a trade-off between the amount of investment required to effect a change like this and manage it on an ongoing basis and the benefit that it's going to pay back to you. So, you do want something that's going to be able to be automated and yet help deliver good results for you.

Gardner: Dave, to go further on your points, it seems that IT has been very busy for 10 or 15 years helping other aspects of the business do precisely this, which is to mature to gain access to data across different aspects of a process, a part of the supply chain, or manufacturing or transportation activity. Then, they allow that to be centralized and analyzed and then they implement what changes seem appropriate back into what's going on within those applications. So, IT is basically now at a point where it needs to start drinking its own tea, if you will. Lori does that make sense?

Ellsworth: Oh, absolutely. In the last several years, would we be running a business without visibility into the finance organization or the finance side of the business or into the sales forecast? The technology organization is now becoming more and more strategic to the success of the company. We need to understand what we're investing and what return we're getting for that investment.

Gardner: So, we're back to the economic environment and this need to mature more rapidly. Perhaps, like an adolescent, IT needs to have a growth spurt, rather than go through a long pleasant trip.

Now that we've recognized the dimension of the problem, how does one get started?

Choosing a tool is not going to be the answer to any of your challenges, unless you understand the business problem and the level of maturity, and you can embark on a combined people, process, and technology solution.

How does one begin to look at this as a solution and a maturation process for IT and not just, "Oh, let's pick out a product and drop it in?" It's really not a technology solution, is it Lori?

Ellsworth: Correct. What the IT organization has to start with is looking at that investment lifecycle that they're managing, from the demand coming into the business, through execution, managing what they're delivering back to the business, in this case, the application or the business service. They need to look across that entire lifecycle that they are managing and they need to do a couple of things.

They need to understand where their greatest pain points are. Many organizations, once they start a project, are quite comfortable and efficient in delivering effectively. Their pain point is collecting, managing and driving decision-making around the demand. So, it's important to understand the biggest pain points and to understand the organization's maturity. Choosing a tool is not going to be the answer to any of your challenges, unless you understand the business problem and the level of maturity, and you can embark on a combined people, process, and technology solution.

Gardner: Dave Kelly, just to keep the bean counters happy, I think it's important for us to look at a fairly short horizon for payback of some sort from any investments in IT portfolio management. Can you think of what might be low-hanging fruit in terms of where you could apply IT and portfolio management. Perhaps, it would be a consolidation or modernization factor, and we'd then say, "Aha, we've recovered the cost of this and now we can apply it to these other more strategic and transformative types of activity?"

Legacy transformation

Kelly: That's an excellent point. Areas such as legacy transformation or modernization are good for this, because you do have to make a lot of decisions, and Lori may have some other perspectives here as well. Any situation, where there are a number of stakeholders driving that decision-making may be difficult for some organizations, where you need to gain consensus. It's a good application for this type of solution.

It applies to any opportunity for managing new projects -- whether it's a legacy transformation or modernization, a new application or project that may have high dynamic components. It may be something that's not going to be a one hit wonder that you are just applying once, but is going to require some level of ongoing change. If you can justify the maintenance of that change and future changes through the use of the solutions like this, it can certainly help deliver that return on investment (ROI) much faster.

Gardner: How about that, Lori? Do you have any sense of where initial and speedy paybacks are available, perhaps even in regards to energy use?

Ellsworth: One of the things I see with customers is that some of the low-hanging fruit, as you described, is really in the area of redundancy.

It's an opportunity first of all to reduce the total number of applications, and the follow-on is an approach to being more efficient or investing in the applications that are strategic to the business.

It sounds pretty basic, but the moment an organization starts to inventory all of the projects that are under way and all of the applications that are deployed in production serving the business, even just that simple exercise of putting them in a single view and maybe categorizing them very simply with one or two criteria, quite quickly allows organizations to identify those rogue projects that were underway. They are investing resources. There is just no logical reason to keep them going.

Similarly, on the application side, they will quickly learn, "We thought we had 100 applications, and we've now discovered there are 300." They'll also quickly identify those applications that no one is using. There is some opportunity to start pulling back the effort or the cost they're investing in those activities and either reducing the cost out of the business or reinvesting in something that's more important to the business.

Gardner: So, employing IT portfolio management quickly will allow you to discover what application inefficiencies you have, which then, of course, translate back to infrastructure inefficiencies around utilization. Perhaps, you start deploying virtualization and taking the required or remaining applications in, and then deploying them with the most bang for the buck.

Ellsworth: Yes. It's an opportunity first of all to reduce the total number of applications, and the follow-on is an approach to being more efficient or investing in the applications that are strategic to the business.

Gardner: I guess I just wanted to affirm that the savings don't always just come from what you would get from reducing the number of applications. A secondary benefit would be in the way in which you produce these applications in production environment. Therefore, there could be savings on the infrastructure side as well.

Ellsworth: Absolutely.

Consolidation opens doors

Kelly: You could go through consolidation. As you said, it opens up new opportunities for cloud computing or other potential deployment opportunities.

Gardner: There is, of course, a lot of talk about more dynamic sourcing options, but if you want to take advantage of what you might perceive in that regard, you need to know what you have in place and what is required in terms of mission critical versus perhaps expendable.

Kelly: Exactly.

Gardner: Let's look at this again from another perspective for some industries. They may have seen a decrease very rapidly, but federal governments, both in the US and in other countries, have been injecting quite a bit of stimulus money into the environment for public sector and certain industries.

That should give these decision makers in IT and their counterparts on the business side some opportunities to say, "How should we take the stimulus money and most effectively invest it in our organization?" To me IT portfolio management should be in the top tier. Would you agree with that Lori?

Ellsworth: I absolutely would. There is no time where the investment being given to an organization, and in particular to IT, has been more visible. In addition to the money that's being invested as an ongoing course of doing business, there's an additional investment.

Organizations need to make timely and intelligent decisions about how to invest that money. They need to understand the different possibilities, create different potential views of what the future might look like, and really agree as a business, how to invest and keep the visibility in terms of how you are using those investments as well.

Gardner: Dave Kelly, the payback here, as we discussed, can be short-term, medium-term and then long-term, if we look towards that cloud or mixed sourcing future. What necessary steps are there for organizations, whether it's the reaction to stimulus money or just a renewed interested in investment for productivity sense? Where does the decision process for IT portfolio management need to come from? Is it just a CIO-level decision or an engineering VP decision? Where does this really become a purchase?

Kelly: It's generally the higher level, the CIO level. The senior management can drive it,

. . . it's a great time, if there's economic stimulus money coming into an organization. You want to make sure that it's well spent and used efficiently and effectively. . .

as well, and maybe an enlightened engineer also has some good ideas, wants to optimize things, and may be able to bring this process forward. But, It's clearly someone that you want to be able to drive this kind of change across different processes, projects, and applications and make it part of the foundation for an organization.

That doesn't mean it has to spread across the complete organization or complete IT system all at once. You can start in very tactical ways, but the vision is how you make these kinds of consistent decisions in a timely, intelligent, and reliable manner.

So, someone more senior is going to help drive a solution like this. As Lori said, it's a great time, if there's economic stimulus money coming into an organization. You want to make sure that it's well spent and used efficiently and effectively to set the foundation for the organization to deliver on what they are supposed to deliver on, as well as lay the foundation for going forward.

Gardner: And, the visibility that IT portfolio management provides, in my thinking, gets comprehensive in nature. That’s almost to think about an architecture-level decision. Lori, have you seen architecture getting involved with the requirements set around IT portfolio management or are the frameworks like ITIL, TOGAF, and DoDAF spurring on interest in getting this comprehensive view?

Benefiting from visibility

Ellsworth: I'll make a couple of comments. From an architecture perspective, I'm not necessarily seeing that area of the business driving this exercise, but they are participating. They're participating, because they are going to benefit from the visibility. They're driving initiatives across the IT organization. Certainly, the IT portfolio management solution plays a role in an ITIL initiative.

The other comment I would like to add may further David's comment. I'm also seeing an increased interest in participation, from a finance perspective, outside the IT organization. Often, the CIO and the executive in the finance area are working together.

The line of business executives -- the customers, if you will, the CIO -- are starting to be more mature, if I can use that expression in terms of their understanding of technology and of how they should be working with technology and driving that collaboration. So, there is some increased executive involvement even from outside IT, from the CIO's peers.

Gardner: Even at a general level, we're hearing the mentality that no crisis should go wasted, and, if you agree with me that the economic downturn provides an opportunity for transformation and not just for retrenchment, does IT portfolio management allow for a conversion within IT in terms of how it relates to its customers and perhaps even charges them?

That is to say, is this utilization of IT portfolio management a necessary step towards getting into an IT shared-services environment or a discrete charge back, where IT services are defined in business terms and charged accordingly. I'll direct this at Lori.

Ellsworth: It does provide another catalyst to IT behaving more like a business and,

Certainly, there are job-security issues for senior IT people, if they're not able to respond adequately to the CFO or COO or the business need changes.

as you've described, really managing the relationship with their customers, understanding their customers’ priorities, and the customer understanding the cost of what they need. Together, they're starting to work in that customer-supplier -- with a financial aspect -- type relationship.

That's something that IT has been moving towards for several years. Maybe they've been getting a little more push back from their internal customers, but the current economic conditions and the scrutiny on investment are more of a catalyst to get that customer-vendor type relationship going.

Gardner: David, we talked about what IT portfolio management can do. What are the penalties if you don't, if you continue to have manual and even paper-based or spreadsheet-based approaches to keeping track of your assets and resources? It seems to me that the complexity, those choices around sourcing, has been out of control. Furthermore, if I'm on the financial side of the house and I see that IT is floundering in its ability to run itself, I might be tempted to outsource significant portions of it. Right?

Kelly: Absolutely. I think you've highlighted some of the risks there for organizations that don't have good control in terms of the IT decision-making processes. Certainly, there are job-security issues for senior IT people, if they're not able to respond adequately to the CFO or COO or the business need changes.

The answer to your question of what happens if organizations don't move towards IT portfolio management depends upon the organization. If you have a slow-moving organization that doesn't have to make a lot of decisions and doesn't have a lot of investments, maybe they are just fine doing what they're doing, doing it ad hoc or doing it with the spreadsheets.

Consistent rational approach

But, as we've talked about throughout this podcast, any organization that is facing dynamic business conditions, that is investing in new applications or projects, that wants to be able to increase the efficiency in its IT organization, as well as increase the effectiveness of the application solutions it’s bringing to the business, absolutely needs to have some kind of consistent rational approach to gathering information, collecting metrics, being able to collaborate with the business and being able to make decisions in a consistent and rational way.

That really points very strongly towards IT and IT portfolio management or some similar type of solution. There is a little bit of investment required for any solution like this -- time, resources, and money -- but for organizations that have those conditions, it's a really strategic investment.

Gardner: Lori, did we miss anything? Is there a risk here that we didn't bring up yet about resisting a comprehensive view of assets in IT or perhaps even a downward spiral at some kind of that could ensue?

Ellsworth: No. The answer was comprehensive. You are absolutely correct that IT needs to recognize that there are competitive alternatives, and certainly, if IT isn't delivering, the business will go and look elsewhere. In some simple examples, you can see line-of-business customers going out and engaging with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution in a particular area, because they can do that and bypass IT.

The other side of that as well is when IT is executing.

. . . IT needs to recognize that there are competitive alternatives, and certainly, if IT isn't delivering, the business will go and look elsewhere.

If they're not making the right decisions and doing the things that have the highest return to the business or if they are delivering poorly, it's really about missed opportunity and lower ROI. So, while IT might be engaged and they might be delivering, they are minimizing the impact or the value they could be delivering to the business.

Kelly: Dana, let me just add one other thing in here. I really see these kinds of things as an opportunity for IT. We've talked about some of the challenges they may face and some of the problems that there could be going on, but, if you are able to implement a solution like this, it really frees up IT to be able to consider new opportunities.

As you noted, if you can do some application consolidation, you may be able to consider new deployment opportunities and cloud-based solutions. It will make the decision-making process within IT more nimble and more flexible, as well as enable them to respond more quickly to the line of business owners and be able to almost empower them with the right information and a structured decision-making process.

That enables them to take greater risks and take advantage of new opportunities that they might not have been able to, if they just proceed with whatever solutions they have in hand.

Moving toward strategies

Ellsworth: That's a really good point, because the one metric, if I can use that word, that is understood by executives outside of the IT organization is how much of our investment is just going towards keeping things running or of keeping the lights on and how much is towards strategic work. Certainly the lower amount is strategic today. Anytime the CIO can show progress towards moving from keeping the lights on toward more investment strategies, that's something that's easy to understand outside of IT.

Gardner: And on that same topic of metrics, Lori do you have examples perhaps even used cases where the proper deployment of IT portfolio management has the demonstrated tangible result?

Ellsworth: Sure. To just speak generally, we have customers who are seeing improvement, first of all, on the execution side, and those improvements are in the area of being able to deliver projects. So, let's assume for a moment, that we're doing the right things. You're starting to see a 30 percent improvement in delivering a project on time, on budget, and meeting the business need.

If you start to back up, just thinking about that project as strategic, it will have an impact on the business, maybe even a revenue-generating impact. I can increase the probability of delivering it, when it's needed for the cost and meeting the business need, and you can start to translate that into the value back to the business.

Something a little less tangible is making better business decisions. Now, we're not wasting our resources. We're investing them in the right things and looking for a higher return to the business. Most of our customers will start to see what I'll call the supply and demand side of the business, and start to see some tangible returns in that area for certain.

The other area is in your utilization or productivity of resources. Customers are seeing significant increases in that area.

Gardner: Well, we're almost out of time. We've been digging into the need for better-managed processes in IT for how IT operates itself. We're looking at contraction and the requirements to reduce cost at an operating level, but at the same time, needing to prepare for a transformation of IT into perhaps more of a mature business unit to be able to ramp up for growth and take advantage of what stimulus money might be available.

We've been joined by Lori Ellsworth the vice-president of Changepoint Solutions at Compuware. Thank you, Lori.

Ellsworth: Thank you very much.

Gardner: We've also been joined by David A. Kelly, senior analyst at Upside Research. Great to have you with us, David.

Kelly: Great to be here, Dana. Thanks for inviting me.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the transcript. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Compuware.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on managing IT departments in the face of an economic downturn and an infusion of stimulus cash. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

SaaS Delivery of IT Lifecycle and Quality Management Functions Evolves Toward an IT Service-Delivery Solutions Approach

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas the week of June 15, 2009.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here in the week of June 15, 2009 to explore the major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations that are making news across the global HP ecology of customers, partners and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this special series of HP Sponsored Software Universe live discussions.

Please join me in welcoming two executives from Hewlett-Packard's Software and Solutions group. We’re here with Scott Kupor, vice president and general manager of software-as-a-service (SaaS). We’re also here with Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services. Welcome.

Scott Kupor: Thank you, Dana.

Anand Eswaran: Glad to be here, Dana.

Gardner: We’ve heard a lot here at the conference about various new sourcing options, looking to the future and thinking about how to deliver applications in a different way over time. This whole SaaS phenomenon, if you will, over the past several years has had a lot of people thinking about this for business applications.

But, Scott, in your group, there’s been quite a heritage of using SaaS for delivery of infrastructure and productivity in the development and cycle for application creation in IT departments. Tell us a little bit about where SaaS has been, and perhaps we can get a better sense of where it’s going to go.

Kupor: That's a great point. When people think about SaaS, Salesforce.com is obviously what comes to mind, a really traditional application. At HP for the last nine years, we've been selling IT management applications as a service delivery option. If you think about things like testing, performance management, or project and portfolio management (PPM), for example, those are traditional IT applications that we’ve been selling with this similar delivery model.

Gardner: Now that we can get a better sense that there is interest, and now that cost efficiencies have become top of mind for many organizations, where do you suppose this SaaS model can go next?

Kupor: It’s interesting. What we’ve been hearing from customers today at the conference are two key things. Number one, the cost benefits that initially drove them to SaaS are ever present and incredibly more important in this financial environment. The benefits are really coming to fruition. The second is that we’re starting to see a migration of SaaS from what was traditionally testing services toward other more complex and more customizable IT management applications.

The prime example of that is that we’re hearing a lot of interest from customers around IT service management (ITSM), service desk applications, and service management applications. These are things that have traditionally been the domain of inside-the-firewall deployments. Customers are now getting comfortable with the SaaS model so much so that they’re looking at those applications as well for deployment in a SaaS environment.

Gardner: Of course, when we free up these functional sets as services, that gives us more flexibility in how they’re consumed and delivered. Anand, I wonder if you could help us explain how moving from a SaaS deployment helps professional services, organizations, and folks create a better solution approach to some of the problems that IT departments are facing.

A conscious shift

Eswaran: Absolutely, Dana. That’s been the consistent focus and feedback from all the customers over the past 12 months. We’ve made a very conscious shift from what was inherently deployment of products. The approach right now is transformed into what business outcomes can we achieve for the customer, which is something which we would have been unable to do some time back.

We have changed focus now from deploying a single product set to achieving outcomes like reduction of outages by 40 percent, increasing quality, getting service-level agreements (SLAs) to a certain point, and guaranteeing that level of service. That’s been hugely helpful.

The second thing that has been interesting is the huge focus on intellectual property and best practices that we bring to the table right now. This accelerates time-to-market. That was one of the feedbacks we heard last year at the conference. Over the past 12 months, we put a services R&D organization in place. This has massively changed how intellectual property best practices accelerates time to market for the customers, and we're getting very good feedback this year.

The last thing, which is the end game, is that this all gets us to the point of what customers refer to as "killing the game," getting to a point of being able to offer outcome-based pricing and guaranteeing that outcome, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of billing rates and hours.

Gardner: This strikes me as a little counterintuitive. You think of SaaS and you think of a simple delivery of a functional set.

I don’t think people should believe that moving towards a SaaS model necessarily means that they get a lesser degree of service or that they can’t still leverage their own process, their own IT, or their own systems to create meaningful differentiation for their business.

Professional services would be something you’d do for setting up and deploying, crafting, and requirements ahead of a methodological approach. Scott, help me understand, from your perspective, how SaaS and professional services create a whole greater than a sum of the parts?

Kupor: SaaS ultimately is really a deployment option for customers. They’ve always had the option of in-house deployment. SaaS now gives them the option to deploy that application potentially in a third-party data-center environment. It doesn’t obviate the need for the solutions focus, though, that professional services ultimately can bring.

Remember, all these are complex IT management applications, they have third-party integrations. They have custom code that customers are building on top of it. Those are all areas of domains of expertise for the services organization. Through the work that the two of us are doing together, we can deliver a cost-effective delivery option for customers, but without having to sacrifice the complexity, integration, and customization opportunities that they demand for these applications.

Gardner: Then, looking at this as well from a cost perspective, many organizations have gone to SaaS for business applications, because they don’t sense that those applications differentiate them per se, when it comes to a Salesforce automation or human resources.

You’re not going to change your market position by having a better HR department. You might look to outsource. So, is there a same effect within the IT department? Some of these aspects, perhaps PPM, is something that isn’t going to differentiate that IT department. They might look for someone to do a “better, faster, cheaper.”

Kupor: Particularly in this financial environment, “better, faster, cheaper” is still the predominant thing that customers are looking at. I don’t know if it’s a mis-perception or how best to describe it, but I don’t think people should believe that moving towards a SaaS model necessarily means that they get a lesser degree of service or that they can’t still leverage their own process, their own IT, or their own systems to create meaningful differentiation for their business.

It’s really all about just making sure that those people have the best ability to deliver the application expertise with least amount of cost involved. That’s really the sourcing option people are moving towards.

Gardner: Anand, is there something more that you wanted to add to this perception about the intersection of customization and solutions with a SaaS delivery model?

Customers care about outcomes

Eswaran: I'd go back to what I started with, which is that the customers care about the business outcomes they need to create for themselves. As Scott talked about, SaaS is a very viable delivery option right now. When we talk about capital expenditures (CapEx) versus operating expenses (OpEx) and how you shift expenses, it allows customers to have flexibility around that. But, eventually, customers are looking to solve a business problem. They’re looking to create a defined business outcome, where all of this trends forward, it becomes a service for the customer.

All of what we do at the back end, whether it’s how we leverage SaaS, what products we use, what software we use, what consulting and professional services we use, all of that is going to be transparent to the customer. What they care about is a service, which we will deliver to the customer. SaaS enables us to get to that service, get to that time-to-market much faster.

Gardner: Help me understand where we’ll start to see more SaaS delivery in the context of an IT department?

Kupor: What we’re seeing, and we’ve heard this a lot from our customers today, is that they’re actually interested in looking at how do I, as an IT department, deploy my own applications in a third party cloud environment. You hear a lot of people talking about infrastructure on demand or computing power on demand.

People are looking toward these third-party products as a way to basically take an application they’ve built in-house and deploy them externally in, perhaps, an Amazon environment or a Microsoft environment. Where the interesting opportunity is for us, as a

That’s really what IT’s job is -- to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

management vendor, is that customers will still need the same level of performance, availability, security, and data integrity, associated with applications that live in a cloud environment as they have come to expect for applications that live inside their corporate firewall.

We’ve been talking to customers a lot about something called Cloud Assure, which is the first service offering that HP has brought to market to help customers solve those management problems for applications they choose to deploy in a cloud-based environment.

Gardner: This almost sounds like cloud consumption and governance as a service. Is that fair?

Kupor: You’re right. At the end of the day, this is about governance. That’s really what IT’s job is -- to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

If you go back to where we started this discussion, SaaS, cloud, and all these fancy words, really are different types of deployment models for customers. Whether you deploy it in-house, or whether you deploy it in a third-party cloud environment, you still care about that common theme of governance, security, and all the other things that go along with that.

Gardner: Let’s hear a bit about how to get started. If you’re in an IT department, you like some of this, you want to say to your higher-ups, "I’ve got some evidence of why this will work for us," how would you get started?

Robust education services

Eswaran: There are a couple of things. In addition to all the deployment mechanisms we have in our portfolio, we also have a very robust education services arm. One of the things we’re doing is making sure that education services are available to enable customers on not just the products we have and the solutions we can create, but also the different options they have from a delivery perspective.

We also know that travel budgets and travel freezes are a critical component of why customers are not able to send enough people to get educated. We have also created certain leading-edge portfolios within education services. These enable us to deliver instructor-led training, on a virtual basis, to simulate the exact same interaction that customers need to experience.

So, education services and everything we’re doing about it is a very viable option to help them get enabled on all the different delivery models in addition to solution-based and product-based enablement.

Gardner: How about this notion of professional services over time becoming simply a way of picking and choosing among a variety of different services that could be composed, if you will, into a solution. Do you think that’s where we’re headed?

Eswaran: Absolutely, Dana. We come back to the central theme, which you hear and which we firmly believe in. Everything is eventually going to get transformed into a service for the customer, so that they can actually focus on the core business they are in. When you have things transformed into a service, everything we do to offer that service should be transparent to the customer.

It becomes a services-led engagement, but that’s where we clearly differentiate "services" from "service," the singular, which is the eventual outcome the customer needs to create for themselves. That’s why we really partner well between SaaS and Professional Services. We believe that we are on a path of convergence to eventually get to offering business value and a service to a customer.

Gardner: Scott, how do you see this path of convergence shaping up?

Kupor: Yeah, I really agree with everything that Anand said. At the end of the day, we want to figure out for customers, look, what’s the best way to get the outcome you want?

People have used this term “everything-as-a-service.” It’s a common nomenclature these days, but really does describe where we think the industry is going.

In some cases, that may be a deployment option. It might be engaging a professional services to develop a solution, but, at the end of the day, all these things come together. People have used this term “everything-as-a-service.” It’s a common nomenclature these days, but really does describe where we think the industry is going.

Gardner: Well, great, thanks. We’ve gotten a deeper understanding of where SaaS is headed for IT departments. I want to thank our guests. We’ve been talking with Scott Kupor, vice president and general manager of SaaS at HP Software and Solutions Group. We’ve also been joined by Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services at HP. Thank you both.

Eswaran: Pleasure was mine, Dana.

Kupor: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Thanks for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas the week of June 15, 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

Winning the Quality War: HP Customers Offer Case Studies on Managing Application Performance

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas the week of June 15, 2009.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here in the week of June 15, 2009 to explore the major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations that are making news across the global HP ecology of customers, partners and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this special series of HP Sponsored Software Universe live discussions.

Now, please join me for our latest discussion, a series of user discussions on quality assurance issues. Our first HP customer case study comes from FICO. We are joined by Matt Dixon, senior manager of tools and processes, whose department undertook a service management improvement award for operational efficiency and integrity. Welcome to the show Matt.

Matt Dixon: Thanks, Dana. I’m glad to be here.

FICO's service-management approach

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about how you use the development of a service management portfolio approach to your remediation and changes that take place vis-à-vis your helpdesk. It sounds like an awful lot of changes for a large company?

Dixon: Yes. We did go through a lot of changes, but they were changes that we definitely needed to go through to be able to do more with less, which is important in this environment.

The IT service management (ITSM) project that we undertook allows us to centralize all of our incidents, changes, and configuration items (CIs) into a one centralized tool. Before, we had all these disparate tools that were out there and had to go to different tools and spreadsheets to find information about servers, network gear, or those types of things.

Now, we’ve consolidated it into one tool which helps our users and operations folks to be able to go to one spot, one source of truth, to be able to easily reassign incidents, migrate from an incident to a change, and see what’s going to be impacted through the configuration management database (CMDB).

Gardner: Perhaps you can help our listeners better understand what FICO does and then what sort of helpdesk and operational staff structure they have?

Dixon: FICO, formerly known as Fair Isaac, is a software analytics company. We help financial institutions make decisions and we’re primarily known for FICO scores. If you apply for a loan, half of the times you get a FICO score. We’re about 2,300 employees. Our IT staff is about 230. We’re a global company, and our helpdesk is located in India. It’s 24x7 and they are FICO employees -- so that’s important to know.

Gardner: Tell me about the problem set you’re trying to address directly with your IT service management approach?

Dixon: We had two primary objectives we were trying to meet with our ITSM project. The first was to replace our antiquated tool sets. As I said before, we had disparate tools that were

They're very important definitely in today’s economy, and through the completion of our project we've been able to consolidate tools to increase those efficiencies and to be able to do more with less.

all over the place and were not integrated. Some were developed internally, and the development team had left. So, we’re no longer able to keep up with the process maturity that we wanted to do, because the tools could not support the process improvements that we wanted.

In addition to that, we have a lot of sensitive data -- from all the different credit data that we have to medical data to insurance data. So, we go through a vast number of audits per year, both internal and external, and we identified some gaps with our ITSM's previous solution. We undertook this project to close those gaps, so we could meet those audit requirements.

Gardner: I suppose in today’s economy, making sure your operations are efficient, making sure that these changes don’t disrupt, and maintaining the applications in terms of performance are pretty important?

Dixon: They're very important definitely in today’s economy, and through the completion of our project we've been able to consolidate tools to increase those efficiencies and to be able to do more with less.

Gardner: As you transition from identifying your problems and knowing what you wanted, how did you come about a solution?

Request for proposal

Dixon: We sent a request for proposal (RFP) to four different companies to ask them how they would help us address the gaps that our previous tool sets had identified. Throughout that process, we kept a scorecard, and HP was chosen, primarily for three reasons.

Number one, we felt that the integration capabilities within HP, both currently and the future roadmaps, were better than the other solution sets. Number two, we thought that universal configuration management database (UCMDB), through its federation, offered a more complete solution than other CMDB solutions that were identified. The third one was our partnerships and existing relationships with HP, which we relied upon during the implementation of our ITSM solution.

Gardner: And so, were there several products that you actually put in place to accomplish your goals?

Dixon: We chose two primary products from HP. One was Service Manager where we log all of our changes and incidents, and then the second one was the UCMDB, and we integrated those two products, so that the CIs flow into Service Manager and that information flows out of Service Manager back into UCMDB.

Gardner: How long have you had this in place, and what sort of metrics or success and/or payback have you had?

Dixon: We started our implementation last summer, in July of 2008. We went live with Incident in August. We went live with Change Management in October. And, we went live in January with Configuration Management. It was kind of a phased rollout. We started last July, and the project wrapped up in January of 2009.

From the payback perspective, we’ve seen a variety of different paybacks. Number one, now we’ve been able to meet and surpass audit requirements.

Now, we can report on first-call resolution. We can report on a meantime to recover. We can report on all the important information the business is asking for.

That was our number one objective -- make sure that those audits go much faster, that we can gather the information quicker, and that we can meet and surpass audit requirements. We’ve been able to do that.

Number two, we’ve improved efficiencies and we’ve done that through templates, not having to double-enter data because of disparate tools. Now, we have one tool, and that information tracks within all the tools. You don’t have to double-enter data.

The third one is that we've improved visibility through notifications and reporting. Our previous toolset didn’t have a lot of reporting abilities and no notification options. Now, we can report on first-call resolution. We can report on a meantime to recover. We can report on all the important information the business is asking for.

The last one is that we have more enforcement or buy-in of our processes. Our number of changes logged, has gone up by 21 percent. It’s easier to log a change. We have different change processes and workflows that we’ve been able to develop. So, people buy into the process. We’ve seen a 21 percent increase in the number of changes logged from our previous toolset.

Gardner: You’ve got this information in one place, where you can analyze it and feel comfortable that all the changes are being managed, and nothing is falling off the side or in between the cracks. Is there something you can now do additionally with this data in this common, managed repository that you couldn’t do before? Or, were there adds or improvement in terms of moving to a variety of different systems or approaches?

Dixon: We have a lot of plans for the future, things that we’ve identified that we can do. Some of the immediate impacts we’ve seen are our major problem channels -- which CIs have the most incidents logged against them. We identify CIs in incidents. We identify CIs in changes. Now, we can run reports and say, "Which CIs are changing the most? Which CIs are breaking the most?" And, we can work on resolving those issues.

Then, we’ve continually improved the process. We have a mature tool with lot of integrations. We’ve been able to pull all this information together. So, we’re setting up roadmaps, both internally and in partnership with HP, to continually improve our process and tools.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been talking about a case study with a user FICO, and how they’ve implemented ITSM projects. Thanks, Matt.

Dixon: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gevity opts for PPM solutions

Gardner: Our second customer use case discussion today comes from Gevity, part of TriNet. We’re here to discuss how portfolio and project management (PPM) solutions have helped them. We’re here with Vito Melfi. He is the vice president of IT operations. Welcome.

Vito Melfi: Thank you.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about how PPM solutions became important for you?

Melfi: Well, in Gevity, we had, as most other companies do, a whole portfolio of applications and a lot of resources. The desire on Gevity’s part to become a very transparent IT organization was difficult to do, not knowing where your resources are, how you are using them, and how to re-prioritize applications within our company priorities.

The application of portfolio management became very critical, as well as strategic. Today, we have the ability to see across our resource base. We use the time-tracking system, and we can produce portfolio documents monthly. Our client base can see what’s out there as a priority, what’s in queue, and, if we have to change things, we can do so with great flexibility.

Gardner: Now, Gevity does a lot of application support for a number of companies in their HR function. So, applications are very important. Tell us more about how your company operates?

Melfi: We’re a professional employment organization (PEO). We deliver payroll services, benefits and workers’ comp services, and a host of other HR services. We’re essentially an HR service company for hire. We believe that we can provide these capabilities better as a service provider than most companies can provide trying to build this type of technology capability on their own.

Gardner: When you began looking into PPM, complexity of control probably was a number one concern for you?

Melfi: Absolutely. Complexity in an organization can be paramount if you don’t have good control over your resources and over your applications. At Gevity, we had a lot of people trying very hard to get control and get their arms around those things.

The technology that HP provides to PPM really is the enabler for us to figure out our whole portfolio requirement. The communication that comes back to our functional areas

Better internal customer service is always paramount to us. By being able to do more with less, obviously we can take our funding and look into different areas of investment.

and to our client base has been very well received. It's something that we’ve found to be very valuable to us. Then, with taking that through to the quality center and service center, the integration of the three has been just a big benefit to us.

Gardner: What would you say is the solution that this combination of products actually provides for you?

Melfi: The solution that we get out of our service center application is to be able to turn around the incidents that we have. We’ve been able to resolve first call incidents in a 70-80% first call close. This was our ratio with 10 people a couple of years ago, and it’s still our ratio with 7 people doing it. Our service level has maintained okay, and actually improved a bit, and our employee base has gone down. This is particularly important to us as we go forward with our parent company, TriNet, because now we’re going to be merging east- and west-coast operations.

Gardner: So, it’s greater visibility and greater control. How does that translate into returns on either investment in dollars and cents or in the way you can provide service and reliability to your users?

Melfi: It translates in a couple of ways. Better internal customer service is always paramount to us. By being able to do more with less, obviously we can take our funding and look into different areas of investment. Not having to invest in adding people to scale our services creates opportunity for us elsewhere in the organization.

Gardner: Okay. I wonder if there are any lessons that you might have for other folks who are looking at PPM? And, expanding on that, what would you do differently?

Melfi: We knew this, but it really comes to bear when you’re actually doing an implementation of your toolset, the key to success is having good processes. If you have those processes in place, the implementation of the toolset is a natural transition for you.

If you don’t have good processes in place, the tool itself will help, but you're going to have to take a step backwards and understand how these three things interact -- two, or three, or how many you’re implementing. So it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not going to come and automate everything for you. The key is to have a really a good grasp on what you do and how you do it and what your end game is, and then use the tools to your advantage.

Gardner: We’ve been talking about the use of PPM solutions with Vito Melfi. He is the vice president of IT operations at Gevity. Thanks.

Melfi: Thank you.

JetBlue revs up test cycle

Gardner: Our third customer today comes from an HP Software & Solutions Awards of Excellence winner, JetBlue Airways. We’re here with Sagi Varghese, manager of quality assurance at JetBlue. Welcome.

Sagi Varghese: Hi. How are you?

Gardner: Good. Tell us about the problems that you faced, as you tried to make your applications the best they could be?

Varghese: About two years ago, our team picked up the testing for our online booking site, which is hosted in-house. At that time, we had various issues with the stability of the site as well as the capability of the site. Being a value-add customer, we wanted to be able to offer our customer features beyond what came in a canned product offered by our business partner. We wanted to be able to offer additional services.

Over the last two years, we added a lot of features on top of our generic products -- integration with ancillary services like cars, hotels, and things that -- and we did those at a very fast pace. A lot of these enhancements had to be rolled out in a very short time frame.

Almost two years ago, all of the testing was manual and one of the first steps was to adopt a methodology, so that we could bring some structure and process around the testing techniques that we’re using. The next step was to partner with HP. We worked very closely with HP, not only on the functional aspects of the application, but also on the performance aspects of the application.

A typical end-to-end test cycle would take five to six people over several weeks to completely test a new solution or a new release of the application. We made a business case to automate the testing effort or the regression testing, as we call it, or the repeated testing, if you’d like, for want of the simple term. We made a business case to automate that using HP’s Quick Test Pro product and we were able to complete the automation in less than four weeks. That became the starting point.

It involved using a test automation framework that worked with the Quick Test Pro product, and our testing cycles reduced about 70 percent. As time progressed, and we added more features into our online Website, we also became more mature in the utilization of the tool and added more test scripts into our automated bucket, rather than manual. We went from 250 test cases to about 750 test cases that we run today, a lot of them overnight, in less than two days.

Gardner: At JetBlue, of course you’re in a very competitive field, the airline business. Therefore, all of your applications need to perform well. If your customers don’t get what they want in one or two clicks, you’re going to lose them. Tell me a little bit about the solution approach to making your applications better. Is it something that your testing did alone? What did you look for from a more holistic solutions perspective?

Varghese: One of the things that we were looking at was that customer experience. We were working with a product that was offered by a business partner or a vendor

Today, we are turning them around in less than two days, which means we can deliver more features to the market more often and realize the value.

and we were allowed customizations on top of that. We were largely dependent on the business partners, because they host our reservations site. So, we're kind of dependent on them for the performance of the application. We were able to work with them using HP’s LoadRunner product to optimize the performance of the site.

Gardner: You mentioned a few paybacks in putting together better quality assurance. What sort of utilization did you get in some of the tools that you had in place, even though you were going from manual to a more automated approach?

Varghese: About two years ago, even though we had the tools, we had very limited use. We ran a few ad-hoc, automated scripts every now and then. Since we adopted this framework a little over a year ago, we have 100 percent utilization of the tool. We don’t have enough licenses today. We definitely are in dire need of getting more licenses.

Last year, every person on my team went to advanced training. Everybody on the team can execute the 700 scripts pretty much overnight, if they had to. We could run them all parallel. We have 100 percent utilization of the tool and we’re in need for more licenses. I wish we had that capability, and we will in the future.

Gardner: So you’ve been able to cut your testing costs. You have seen better utilization of the tools you have in place and higher demand for more. How does it translate into what you've been able to accomplish in terms of your post-production quality of applications?

Varghese: Historically, when we had manual test cases, delivering a new release or a functionality on our Website involved perhaps three to four months of effort, simply because it took us several weeks to go through one cycle of testing. Today, we are turning them around in less than two days, which means we can deliver more features to the market more often and realize the value.

If you have heard, at JetBlue we have been offering even more leg-room features. This year, we have launched three or four products in the first quarter alone. We’ve been able to do that because of the quick turnaround time offered by the test automation capability.

Gardner: And not only do you reduce the time, what about the rate of failure?

Varghese: The rate of failure has reduced greatly. We brought post-production failures down by about 80 percent or so. Previously, in the interest of time, we would compromise on quality and you wouldn't necessarily do an end-to-end test. Today we have that, I wouldn’t say a luxury, but the ability to run an end-to-end test in less than two days. So, we’re able to pretty much test all of the facets of an application, even if that particular module is not affected.

Gardner: Congratulations on winning the award. This is a great testament that you took this particular solution set and did very good things with it.

Varghese: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us.

Gardner: We've been talking with Sagi Varghese, manager of quality assurance at JetBlue, a winner today of HP Software & Solutions Awards of Excellence.

Thanks for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

Also look for full transcripts of all of our Software Universe live podcasts on the BriefingsDirect.com blog network. Just search the web for BriefingsDirect. The conference content is also available at www.hp.com, just search on the HP site under Software Universe Live 2009.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas during the week of June 15, 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.